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Sunday, 7 December 2014

I heard the
2014 Booker Prize winner, the Australian novelist, Richard Flanagan, in a
literary programme a few years ago. I had heard his name and had even a novel
of his in my collection, Gould’s Book of Fish (but only
because I had got it for a couple of quid in a second-hand bookshop, and the title
and premise had seemed interesting) which I had not got round to read. Indeed the
only reason I attended the Richard Flanagan's talk was because I had bought
the ticket for the whole programme for a discount.

Flanagan
informed the audience with pride he made no attempt to conceal that his people
were convict people. They had all been sent out during the famine to the gulag
of the British Empire that was Tasmania. The land was originally called Van
Demon’s Land, and the name remained until, I guess, it ceased to be a gulag. Flanagan
was born in Longford, a village with a population slightly less than that of
the backstreets of East End of London. Longford was the place where Flanagan’s
great great grandfather was sent for stealing corn worth eight pounds (given
what eight pounds at the height of famine would be worth nowadays, it was probably a robbery). Flanagan’s father was a primary school teacher and, when Flanagan was three, was posted to Rosebury, an isolated mining town with a population even less than
that of Longford (so not really a town), five miles away from civilization in
every direction (imagine Norfolk).

Flanagan
went on to inform the audience that, disgracefully, he always wanted to become
a writer, which, he acknowledged, made no sense. He even wrote a letter to his
sister when he was six, informing her that he wanted to be a writer. The conclusion is ineluctable: Flanagan was a child prodigy. He didn’t inform his
parents, however, until he was well into his twenties, about the career he had
chosen (probably because he was worried what his mother’s reaction would be, as
she had set her heart upon Flanagan becoming a plumber). Be that as it may,
once Flanagan decided to become a writer he had to leave Tasmania. “Why?” I
hear you asking. I have no idea. If it helps Flanagan couldn’t provide a
satisfactory explanation either in the programme, although that was not, going
by his facial grimaces when he discussed it, because of want of trying. You just
could not do literature in Tasmania, and that is that. You could be a labourer or a goatherd (or a primary school teacher) in Tasmania, but if you wished to become
a writer, you had to go to Europe and America. Trying to become a writer in Tasmania was like having your teeth checked by Shane MacGowan. No sane person would do
it. So that’s what Flanagan did, or didn’t do. He came to England, Oxford to be
exact, on a Rhodes scholarship. It was in Oxford that Flanagan started writing
and getting published. He wrote history books, even though what he really
wanted to do was to write a novel (which would with the Booker Prize one day), because
it was apparently easy (or easier) to publish history books.

After the
stint in the grimy, grey and flat England, Flanagan returned to
Tasmania and (since the money he earned from the history books would not have
bought a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe) he started labouring. Literally. He worked
as a labourer through the winter and a river guide through summer. He hadn’t
given up on his ambition to become a writer, though, and, through a friend,
managed to get paid $ 10,000 to write the story of a Bavarian criminal. The
German had defrauded the banks in Europe of hundreds of millions of dollars,
and, after escaping to Australia and being subjected to the biggest manhunt in Australian
history, was eventually caught and sent to prison, where, entirely expectedly,
he was offered a huge contract to write his story, which he had accepted. The
slight trouble was the man could not write. That is where Flanagan stepped in
and started inventing the criminal’s life story in a Hobart Cafe. Could he not
have, like, interviewed the German? Well, no; because the criminals blew his
brains out before he was to appear in court, which was within a few weeks of Flanagan
trousering his ten thousand dollars.

Flanagan’s
first published novel was The Death of a River Guide, which,
Flanagan disarmingly informed the audience, did not attract rave reviews from
the critics. But, what do the critics know? The readers loved the novel, kept
on buying it, which meant that the publishers had no choice but to publish
reprints of the novel. Tough, but such is life.

Flanagan’s
second published novel was The Sound of One Hand Clapping. (If
you want to know how that can be possible, you would need to read the novel.)
Flanagan focused on the Eastern European migrant community (Slovanian, in this
case) in the novel. Flanagan nearly won a prize for this novel, but was pipped
to the post by a novel which was about a Ukranian mass murderer. The novel was
written by one Ukrainian writer named Helen Demidenko, except that she was
not Ukrainian and was not Helen Demidenko. Her real name was Helen Darville and she was the
daughter of an English nurseryman. That Demidenko/Darville cheated him out of a prize
obviously rankled with Flanagan after all these years. He described the Demidenko/Darville’s novel as an anti-Semitic work that read like a pornographic
comic book, and added, incredulity written all over his face, that the literary
establishment loved it. (Maybe the novel indeed was as poor as Flanagan thought
it was. Let’s hope that he will be in a more forgiving mood towards
Demidenko/Darville’s novel after The Narrow Road to the Deep North
was lapped up by the critics.)

Flanagan’s
next novel, Gould’s Book of Fish, is the one he was most famous for (until The
Narrow Road to the Deep North came along). Flanagan had never heard of either Gould, a convict called William Gould, or his book comprising 28 water colour
paintings of fish. The archivist who made Flanagan aware of the existence of
the book had hidden the book (also named as Gould’s Book of Fish) in a
cupboard. Apparently no pictures of convicts incarcerated on Sarah Island
(where William Gould served his sentence) are available and, as Flanagan looked
at the paintings of fish, it seemed to him that the convict Gould was trying to smuggle some sort of experience out of the island through the eyes of these
fish. The idea of the book came to him instantly. He knew that each chapter of
the novel would begin with one of the pictures of the fish. This book took off
and—Flanagan had no hesitation in declaring this—became a monster across the
globe. This was a fun book for Flanagan, but he did not want to be imprisoned
in it. So his next book was the incredibly bleak (by his own admission) novel
describing the unsafe paranoid world we have come to inhabit after 9/11 (The
Unknown Terrorist). (It always amazes me how many of us in the Western
world made the discovery for the first time that the world is paranoid and unsafe after 9/11. If I
make so bold as to point out, the world was always paranoid and unsafe; a
modicum of research would reveal that people in different parts of the world were
always getting massacred and meeting horrific deaths, before 9/11.) This
book, too, was a big hit and a best seller in Australia, though it received
mixed reception from the critics.

The
programme I attended was really about what at that time was Flanagan’s most
recent novel, entitled Wanted, but, by the time Flanagan
came round to talk about it, my concentration, which, at the best of times, has
a shorter span than that of the fish in one of Flanagan’s novel, was wavering (the interviewer’s proclivity to ask very long-winded questions,
matched by Flanagan’s proclivity to give longer winded answers might
also have something to do with it, as also the captivating spectacle of the man
sitting in the front row showering dandruff on his collar every time he moved
his head).

I left the
literary programme thinking to myself that I should read Gould’s Book of Fish,
which seemed like an intriguing novel. And forgot about it (and its author) until
this year when it was announced that Flanagan had won the Man Booker prize for The
Narrow Road to the Deep North. I read The Narrow Road to the Deep North
last month. I must confess that I wasn’t swept away by it—and neither did I notice (therefore
appreciate) the lyrical quality of Flanagan’s prose (about which the interviewer
in the literary programme had talked a lot, making faces as if he was trying
desperately not to burp)— but I thought that it brought to the fore the ironies and
futilities of life in a manner that made you think. You can’t say that about
many books.

Thursday, 4 December 2014

May We Be Forgiven, American writer A M Homes’s 2012
novel, starts brilliantly. Harry Silver, a Jewish underachieving academic
(there is no cause and effect, here), a Nixon scholar, married to an
American-Chinese woman, who is more successful (that is she earns far more
money than Harry), is having a Thanksgiving dinner with the family of his
younger brother, George. George, of whom Harry is secretly jealous, is a
successful executive in a television company and—it is a job requirement,
really—is an aggressive psychopath who likes to brag. So that’s what George is
doing at the dinner table. Talking about himself while “picking turkey out of
his teeth”. Harry is toing and froing between the kitchen and dining room, as
Claire, his Chinese-American wife, is sitting at the table listening to
George’s self-aggrandizing talk and George’s teenage children are sitting like “lumps” at the table, “as if poured into their chairs”, “truly spineless”,
their “eyes focused on the small screens” in front of them. Its Jane, George’s
wife, who is helping Harry clean up in the kitchen. Then Jane cosies towards
Harry and plants a kiss, “wet, serious and full of desire” on George. Fast
forward a few months. George jumps a red traffic signal and rams into another
car, killing the couple in the car on the spot though their young son survives.
George has what the psychiatrists describe as a breakdown and is wheeled into the
local hospital. Harry is dispatched by Claire to help George and Jane. Harry
takes his job way to seriously and begins comforting Jane in George and Jane’s
marital bed while George is undergoing psychiatric evaluation in the hospital
as his lawyer tries to figure out whether the charges against George can be
mitigated by a diagnosis of psychiatric illness. One evening, much to Harry’s
discomfort, George arrives at the house (it is after all his house), having taken
his discharge against medical advice, and finds Jane and Harry in the master
bedroom without any clothes on and so close that no light can pass between
them. George picks up the heavy bedside lamp and swings in the general
direction of the head of his unfaithful wife; then he swings again. The lamp
makes contact on both occasions and Jane’s head is a squishy mess of broken
chips of bone, hair and grey matter. Now George is in serious trouble, and is
wheeled off to the locked loony bin for the criminally insane. Claire discovers
Harry’s infidelity and gives him the marching orders. The head of the
university where he teaches “Nixon” gives Harry the news that comes as a
surprise only to Harry: no one is interested in learning about Nixon, and Harry
would not be required from the next semester onwards. Not exactly the
circumstances that would put you in the frame of mind to take on the
guardianship of your nephews whose mother's speedy dispatch off to the next
(not necessarily better) world was substantially assisted by your bedroom
callisthenics with her in the moments leading to her death. But that’s what
Harry ends up doing. It is a responsibility for which he is ill-prepared, not
having any children of his own; and, to be sure, he finds himself in
unexpected, not to say tricky, situations, such as advising on telephone his
niece who has started menstruating which “hole” to insert the tampon into (she
has inserted into the wrong “hole”), and organizing his nephew’s bar mitzvah in
a South African village the nephew has “adopted”. Then there is Harry’s mother,
stagnating in a nursing home and losing the last of her marbles to the
inexorable march of dementia. George, the psychopathic killer, has been shifted
from the high secure mental hospital to a scheme that looks more dodgy than the money laundering capers one reads about in the Daily Mail. In the middle of this hectic itinerary, Harry
has to find time to sexually satisfy mentally unstable housewives and random
women he meets in local supermarkets, more horny than a rabbit on Viagra. When
the novel ends, 365 days (and 500 pages) later, Harry is in charge of a whole
gaggle of children (including the hyperactive kid whose parents George killed
before he decided to treat his wife’s head as a golf ball), and a village in
South Africa that seems to subsist nicely for months on the pocket-money
Harry’s nephew sends them by saving on his ice-candies. Does Harry grow up
emotionally and is a better person at the end of the year more topsy turvy than
the helter skelter in the village fun-fair? You certainly hope so.

May We Be Forgiven is a sprawling, frequently
meandering, tale with a large cast of characters. There are several strands to
the plot, some of which—for example, Harry’s expertise on Nixon and his
involvement with the Nixon’s family who has found a stash of manuscripts of
short stories the disgraced former president of America allegedly wrote—sit
uneasily in the bigger story, while some others—such as Harry’s dementing
mother who is having a nookie with a man of advanced years—much to the disgust
of his daughters—probably do not effectively serve their intended purpose,
which, I thought, was to depict Harry’s slow maturation as a person and
re-establishing dwindling family ties, although they are, undoubtedly, funny.

There are a lot of whacky characters in May We Be Forgiven (rather like
Homes’s earlier novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, which
was a great commercial success). As a result, the novel has a surreal, almost
absurd, feel to it. In an interview Homes commented that she believed that we
lived in moment when reality itself was somewhat surreal. What she appears to
have tried in May We Be Forgiven, with considerable, if uneven, consistency, is
capture the oddity and inexplicability of daily life. The narrative pitch is
(deliberately, I think) kept an octave high to arrest the reader’s attention.
The novel seems plot-driven at the beginning, but after that the story becomes
somewhat picaresque; however, such is Homes’s control over the pace of the
narrative that the reader carries on turning the pages, plunging more and more
into Harry’s life which seems increasingly adrift.

What also
raises May We Be Forgiven above the mundane is Homes’s great feel for
dialogue and her black humour. Some
stretches of dialogue are side-splittingly funny; they could easily fit into a
comic sketch. Life, Homes once remarked, can be so painful and disturbing that
if one has to survive it, one has to find humour in it. The novel is not a
satire, but what it manages with appreciable success is to combine the serious
with the comic, and in the process tells the story of the redemption of a cold,
emotionally distant man.

May We Be Forgiven, despite its flaws, is a gloriously
readable, wickedly funny and uplifting read.

Tuesday, 18 November 2014

I must
admit to several character weaknesses in my personality make-up. Call me
squeamish, but I don’t like confrontations. I go out of my way to avoid
confrontations. I am also a creature given to contradictory, usually
short-lived but very genuine, enthusiasms. I have a near-compulsive need to
rationalise; I try with the best of my abilities to put myself in others’
shoes; I try to understand; I attempt to find reasons when there are no reasons
to be found; and then I try to convince myself, against my better judgment,
that what is clearly unpalatable will be palatable if only I tried harder. The
result, more often than not, is I end up making decisions I regret even as I am
making them. I agree to do things I know I will hate even as I agree; and I accept
things every rational part of my brain is screaming I should be treating with the
same suspicion with which Prince Philip approaches the extended hand of an
Australian aboriginal.

I have been
a member of a book group for more than a year. Don’t ask me why I agreed to
join the group (see the paragraph above). Essentially I could not say no when a
friend of a friend invited me to join. To be honest I was also flattered—like when
an unattractive teenager with spotty face and dandruff on his collar is asked
out by the attractive girl in the class with bouncy bust, he is secretly
lusting after—when he said he and his book-mates would be very honoured if
someone like me who was such a voracious reader joined the group. I got a bit
carried away. I thought that in these monthly gatherings to discuss literary
fiction I—the voracious reader—would dazzle the other members with my searing
comments, mordant wit and incisive insights.

A year down
the line, I am regretting the decision. It was a mistake. It was never going to
work. When a group comprises more than half a dozen individuals, it is
impossible that they will have the same taste in reading. Now, you might say
that that’s a good thing. People, in such groups, will suggest different
genres, and you’d read books you’d otherwise not have read.

That is
exactly my problem. I have been reading books in the past one year I’d have not
read otherwise, and, reading them has confirmed to me that I was right in
avoiding them all these years. I do not buy this argument that it is good once
in a while to read books that won’t be on your usual reading list. Taste in
reading is a bit like taste in wine. If you don’t have the taste for it, no
amount of trying is going to make you like the vinegar that is passed for a
wine in California.

Then there
are the members of the book-groups.

One of the group
members relishes in describing himself as a “working class boy from East End of
London”. I don’t know what he does for living (he works for some charity, I
think), but he gives autumn parties, books tickets for the first day of the
Ashes tests, drinks white chateauneuf du
pape, and is a member of a frigging book club. But he refuses to consider
himself even an honorary member of the middle classes. The man does not strike
me as mentally privileged and his command over English is shaky at best. Probably for these reasons he claims to hate middle
brow fiction. Which basically is any novel that is literary and does not have
gruesome murders in it. Sometime ago we discussed The Good Soldier. The man
read the first ten pages of the novel and apparently lost the will to live. He
could not carry on. It’s a matter of regret that he did not kill himself. That’s what he does with any novel that
challenges his attention span, and announces in the meetings that the novel was
full of “middle class nonsense” and he simply could not read such tosh. He gets
on my nerves. He is forever suggesting novels of writers like Carl Hiaasen and
George Pelecanos. A couple of months ago, probably just to have a break from
his moaning, the group agreed to read a George Pelecanos novel called The
Cut. Words fail me to describe how awful the novel was. It really had
no redeeming features. It was an easy read, but, since I am not a fast reader,
I still wasted four days finishing it. When the group met, it turned out that
the majority had not liked it. A few members laid into the novel, and I actually
found myself arguing that the novel was not as bad as that; that it had some
witty dialogues; and that there was a semi-believable depiction of the soft
underbelly of Washington D.C., the city in which apparently majority of
Pelecanos’s novels are set.

This brings
me to my second problem. In the past one year I have not managed to dazzle the
group with my searing observations and mordant wit. Indeed I have not managed
to say much at all in the meetings. There are a few reasons for this. It seems
to me that for some group members the ability to listen to others is about as
useful, in this day and age, as the ability to make fire with twigs. It is not
necessary; they can do without it. As soon as the discussion opens these guys
launch into their monologues as if a yearlong curfew on speaking has just been
lifted for a few hours. They are fluent, I will grant them that. (Do they
rehearse in front of the mirror what they are going to say in the meeting?) Some
of them have done creative writing courses and, even though they have not got
round to publish even a short story, they use lots of technical words with the
relish of a gynaecologist explaining hysterectomy procedure to his patient. It
is not that they don’t have a point. Unlike the “working class boy from East
End of London” some of these guys have an interest in reading. (The “working
class boy”, I suspect, comes mainly to eat, and also because he has probably
heard that sophisticated, cultured people join book groups, although he would
soon shoot himself between the eyes than accept that he wants to be cultured
and sophisticated.) But they talk too much, probably working on the principle
that it is a sin to be precise and concise when you can waste five times the
required number of words. They are tireless and tiresome. As they drone on I
try to keep myself awake, as I poke about my pepperoni pizza, by thinking
imaginative questions such as why only fingernails continue to grow while the
rest of the body stops, and whether the plump waitress sashaying seductively
between tables (although for all that sashaying not great in the tits
department) and wearing improbably tight trousers would burst an artery in her
pelvis. On the rare occasion when I manage to get a word in edgeways, I, to my
disgust, find myself saying mealy mouthed wishy-washy things which are vaguely
complimentary. Even when I have not liked the novel (which has been the case
75% of the time so far) I avoid criticising it harshly. Why do I do it?
Probably for the same reason I do not make a fuss when the waiters are rude in
restaurants, or when a young mother demands to get ahead of me in the queue at
the till because her child is cranky, or why I don’t ask the old biddy, who
happens to sit next to me on the bus and who attaches great importance to
telling you her entire life history, to shut up. I don’t want to hurt people’s
feelings. I want to be nice.

If I were a
man of metal, if I had the personality strength of an iron skillet, if I were
not obsessed about offering the world my unwavering amiability and appearing
relentlessly reasonable, I would tell the other group members that I was sorry
to be the bearer of a bad news but it would be grossly irresponsible to suggest
anything different; that the book group meetings were so dire that I would
rather have my teeth slowly extracted (without local anaesthesia) by a chatty
dentist who has had lots of onions for lunch than spending an evening in a
restaurant the white tiles of which put you in the mind of a urinal, in the
company of people in comparison with whom parish meetings of Dagenham city
council were like a gallon of coffee.

We are
going to discuss The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry next month.

Saturday, 8 November 2014

Trumpet is the début (and so far the only)
novel of the British poet Jackie Kay. First published in 1998, Trumpet
won the Guardian Fiction Prize.

The
protagonist of Trumpet is a renowned jazz musician called Joss Moody. Moody is
a famous trumpet player (the title of the novel is a direct reference to the
instrument that brings fame to Moody). Joss Moody around whom the novel
revolves never speaks directly to the reader because he is dead. The novel
begins with the death of Moody. Moody has died, leaving behind his widow, Millie,
and his adopted son, Colman. The world of Jazz music has lost one of its
greatest exponents. However, this is not the only reason why Moody, in his
death, is dominating the headlines in the tabloids. In his death Joss Moody can
no longer keep the secret he has lived with all his life. Moody, who lived all
his life as a man, was married and adopted
a son, was born a woman, and, anatomically , remained a woman all
his/her life. The “discovery” of Moody’s
true gender attracts lots of unwarranted media attention, complete with
prurient speculations about the sex lives (and sexual orientations) of Moody
and “his widow”.

Trumpet tells the story of Joss Moody through
different voices: the funeral director (who discovers the true sex of the
famous trumpeter); the drummer in the band to which Moody belongs; an
avaricious journalist who is trying to make a name for herself out of the drama
of Moody’s life with the sensitivity of George W Bush on a bad-hair day; Millie, Moody’s “wife”, who has known all
along that her “husband” was a woman ; and last but not the least, his son
Coleman, who doesn’t know, until he reads the newspapers, that the man he thought was his father was in fact a
woman.

The premise
of Trumpet
is not as preposterous as it might seem. The novel is based on the real life American Jazz musician called Billy Tipton. Tipton was born a woman—Dorothy
Tipton. A piano player, Tipton started her musical career in the 1930s. She
used to appear as a man during public performance, but, by 1940, she had begun living
as a man even in private. Tipton went on to have a series of relationships with
women, some of which lasted for several years. (Those partners of Tipton who could be contacted after Tipton's death clarified tat they were aware that Tipton was a woman; all of them consaid that they considered themselves to be heterosexuals.) Tipton adopted three sons in the
1960s when “he” was in a relationship with a woman, and, upon separating from
her, carried on living with “his” three sons who apparently remained blissfully
unaware that their father was in fact a woman even when they reached puberty. Tipton died in poverty in 1989. The sons became aware of their father’s anatomy when Tipton, at the age of 74
became ill (he had resisted for months going to the hospital) and paramedics
were called. Tipton never explained or left behind any note explaining why he
chose to live the way he did. It has been speculated that the scene of Jazz
music was dominated by men in the 1930s when Tipton started out, and s/he
might have felt it necessary to take on the persona of a man in order to have a career.
Some of Tipton's professional colleagues felt that Dorothy Tipton was a lesbian
because during the years when she was appearing as a man only during public
performances, she lived with another woman.

Trumpet makes no attempt to explain the
fictional Joss Moody’s sexuality. Was Moody a lesbian? A transvestite? A
transsexual? Kay is not interested in spelling this out for the readers. Just
as Dorothy Tipton, the real life inspiration behind Joss Moody, never explained
what motivated her to live the most whole life as a man, Trumpet leaves it for the
reader to figure out why Moody lived his life the way he did. What Kay is
interested in are identity and love, and she explores these themes with great
subtlety. On the one hand we have the dead Joss Moody, who, for all outward
appearances, had no conflict in his mind about his identity, which, to most,
would seem more complicated than Christopher Nolan’s Inception; on the other
hand there is Moody’s adopted son, Coleman, whose sexual identity is
straightforward enough, but who has struggled all his life to come out of the
shadow of his famous father, and, not having any musical (or any other skills)
to speak of, is drifting in search of an identity. The revelation of his father’s
gender triggers a riot of emotions in Coleman’s mind compared to which the
Bolshevik revolution was a tea party, and makes his struggle for identity more
convoluted. Coleman’s struggle to accept his father for what he was is a
powerful strand of the novel. Millie, Moody’s widow, is also grappling with the
issue of identity, though there is no confusion in her mind. Millie, who has
always known that Joss was a woman, views herself as straight, and does not
accept the media’s depiction of her as a lesbian. To Millie it matters not a
jot that Joss Moody was anatomically a woman. She loved Joss for what he was. Although
not explicitly stated, it is implied that Joss Moody considered himself a man,
and that is good enough for Millie. The sections describing the relationship
between Joss and Millie are very moving without ever descending into the
maudlin. The ending has a twist but it’s not gimmicky.

Trumpet, at its heart, is a love story; but
it is also a psychological thriller and an exposition of identity. Jackie Kay
is a renowned poet and has an extraordinary feel for language. She knows how to
select, what to focus on, how make her characters sparkle and how to make her
scenes vivid. The different voices of the novel are handled with great aplomb and
are utterly convincing. All—even the slightly stereotypical and unlikeable journalist—are
treated with compassion. Not an easy thing to pull off, one would have thought,
but Kay manages it.

Trumpet is a wonderful novel. Humane,
poignant, wise and insightful, it’s one of those novels that give you a rich
sense of satisfaction when you reach the last page.

Saturday, 18 October 2014

The hiatus
is over. After two years of awarding the Nobel
Prize for Literature to non-Europeans, the 2014 Nobel Prize for
literature is awarded to an European; a Frenchman. Quelle surprise!

The Nobel
Prize went to a cuddly Chinese, Mo Yan, in 2012, who was derided by some as an
apologist or a puppet of the dictatorial Chinese regime; therefore,
presumably, not worthy of the award, which, in the years bygone, was awarded to
such luminaries as the Nazi apologist Knut Hamsun. Herta Muller, the 2009 Nobel
Laureate, was moved to publically declare that she felt like crying when she
heard that Mo Yan had won the award (not because she had anything to say—at
least not in the interview she gave—about the literary merits or lack thereof
of Mo Yan’s novels, but because of his political leanings; that Mo Yan was not outraged
enough (or not at all) to publically express his outrage of the outrage of the Tiananmen Square in 1989,
which outraged many Western intellectuals—and avoided certain incarceration, was
unacceptable). One hoped that the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Mo Yan helped
Muller to sympathize with many in Rumania, the country of Muller’s birth, who
no doubt felt like crying when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for what many in
that country regarded as her unreadable paranoid rants against the Communist
regime which she passed off as fiction (her rants, that is; not the Communist regime, which was very real). In 2013 the Nobel Prize was awarded to
Alice Munro, a short story writer of meagre talents who elevated monotony to
the level of art. The menu of your local Tandoori will have more variety than Munro’s
short stories.

The 2014
Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded to one Patrick Modiano. Why was
Modiano awarded the Swedish award?
According to the press-release by the Swedish academy, Modanio got the
Nobel

“for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable
human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”.

What in the name of Allah does this mean? Art of memory . . . most ungraspable human destinies . . .
life-world of occupation . . . Who writes such lines? Does the Swedish academy
employ someone on the verge of thought disorder (or has taken long distance
course in writing like a patronizing tw*t) to do the press releases? If you
search through the entire awful vocabulary of clichés, you’d struggle to come
up with something as nonsensical as this.

When I first read this I interpreted “occupation” as
activities people do to earn their daily living, to keep themselves occupied
etcetera. I was wrong. “Occupation” , here, refers to the occupation of France
by Germany during the Second World War. An understandable mistake, you will
agree, I hope, if you have not read anything by Modnio, or, for that matter,
never heard of him until the Nobel committee decided to confer upon him the
award, using barely decipherable language.

An article in The Guardian (after Modanio won the
award) informed that Modanio delights in mystifying his readers. Is it a
short-hand for wooly writing? I wouldn’t know. As I said, I have not read any
of Modanio’s novels.

What might increase your chances, these days, of being
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Firstly it will help you enormously if you were European or
Scandinavian. A glance at the Nobel Laureates in the past twenty years will
show that 13 were European (including British & Irish). Of the remaining
seven, one is Turkish (Orhan Pamuk), another is Naturalized British of Indian
descent who was born in the Caribbean (V.S. Naipaul), while a third one is
naturalized French of Chinese descent (Gao Xingjian). Kenzaburo Oe (1994) who
is Japanese; J.M. Coetzee (2003), who is South African; Mo Yan (2012), a
Chinese; and Alice Munro (2013), who is Canadian, are the only authors in the
last twenty years to have won the Nobel, who can be said to have no European connection.

Have you heard of J.M.G. Le Clezio? I thought not. He won the
Nobel in 2008. He is the author of “new
departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy”. He is the “explorer of the humanity beyond and below
[but not above or sideways] the reigning civilization”. I bought, on an
impulse, three books of the “author of new departures”, hoping to find the
promised sensual ecstasy. I am sorry to say that I couldn’t find it despite
using the most powerful microscope, in the only novel of Le Clezio (his debut novel) I have read till date. Would I find it in the other two novels which I
bought? Possibly, but I am not going to risk it. I am thinking of flogging the
novels on the Amazon.

Herta Muller, who won the Nobel the year after Le Clezio,
is a writer “who with the concentration
of poetry and frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” (What is “concentration of poetry”?) The two
novels of Muller which I have read (one of which I have reviewed on this blog)
were almost as unreadable as those of Le Cleizo, but less abstruse in their themes. Muller is a writer (both the novels dealt with the plight of ethnic
German in Communist Rumania after the Second World War, so Muller does write
about the dispossessed) who takes boredom to unheard of levels. This is a
writer who will give you an eye-witness account of the Crucifixion and can
still put you to sleep.

Imre Kertezsz, who won the award in 2003 has had a 3-4
of his novels translated into English, of which I have read a couple. Fateless,
Kertesz’s autobiographical work of fiction (? A fictional memoir) was outstanding,
but the next one I read, Kaddish for an Unborn Childwhere an
unnamed narrator explains why he chose never to have children was a masterclass
in abject misery and self-pity. When you finally reach the end of this 80-odd
pages novella, the only reason you don’t strangle the moaning whingeing, self-obsessed narrator is because you are too exhausted by the ponderous style (either of the translator or Kertesz) to do anything other than totter into a dark room and wash down some paracetamol with Jack Daniel's and lie down for the next five hours.

This brings me to the second criterion. In addition to having
some connection to Europe, you must make efforts to write on subjects no one is
interested in, and in a style that is a cure for treatment resistant insomnia.
Your novels cannot, under any circumstances, be accused of
having a story or a narrative structure.

The third, and most important, criterion is that you are not
allowed to be American. If you are an American novelist hoping to be considered
for the Nobel, just forget it. It’s not gonna happen, at least not any time
soon. The last American to win the Nobel was Toni Morrison, who won the award
in 1993. There were those who thought Updike ought to have been awarded the
Nobel. Well he wasn't. The trouble with Updike was that for the best part of
his career he wrote novels that were accessible, enjoyable, and which people took the trouble to read. He tried to make up for this shortcoming by writing a
series of novels, in the later part of his writing career, which were about
nothing in particular and not particularly easy to read. But that was not good
enough (too little, too late); he was never going to be on par with the likes of Le Cleizo and Muller. Not
surprising, really; you can’t expect a toaster, after a life-time of making
crunchy toasts, to become a washing machine; it might try, and you might applaud
the effort; but it is not going to be good at it. Updike died unawarded.

These days I read,
from time to time, how Philip Roth is thought by many (mostly Americans) to be a
worthy Nobel winner, and how it is a shame that he continues to be ignored.
Well Roth is not European; so tough luck. He also suffers from the fatal flaw
of having written countless novels which were funny, extremely readable,
thought provoking, and, mostly, of high quality. He might consider (like
Updike) changing his writing style and attempt writing something that would
inspire the hacks at the Nobel committee to describe his writing as something
that depicts the universality of myth (richly and inventively, I hasten to
add), imbued with poetic intensity, and showing deep awareness of the human
condition. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. (Indeed Roth has declared that
he is through with writing novels. Nemesis, his 2009 novel is going to
be his last novel, Roth has announced.) And, as a Philip Roth fan, I would not
have wanted him to do it anyway. Would you ask your favourite chef who specializes
in making mouth-watering, succulent, rich (and fattening)) roast beef to make a
tofu dish, which, nutritional it might be, will have the taste and texture of office
furniture?

Sunday, 12 October 2014

When the
novel opens we meet Dellarobia Turnbow, its feisty heroine, walking up the
pasture behind her house in Southern Appalachia. Dellarobia is a Southerner,
born and bred in Appalachians. She is married into a sheep farming family, and
has lived with her husband Burley junior—Cub—Turnbow, and their two
children—Preston and Cordelia—on the family farm, with her parents-in-law,
Hester and Burley senior (appropriately called Bear), living a stone’s throw
away. (Dellarobia is in no doubt that her stern, austere and church-going
mother-in-law has never warmed up to her.) Life, it would be fair to say, has
not exactly been a bed of roses for Dellarobia. Born into a poor family she falls
pregnant when she is seventeen. Giving up her ambitions for college education
Dellarobia marries Cub (the culprit), and has spent ten years on the farm owned
by her parents-in-law. Cub, the only child of his parents, has neither the
intellectual wherewithal nor the initiative to strike it out on his own, and is
uncomplaining about being treated as a glorified liegeman by his parents. “Bear”
is a ship- farmer. He also runs a business of farmyard equipments, while “Cub”,
helps his father out, and in his spare time works for a gravel delivery firm as
a manual labourer. The Turnbow family, in other words, is a poor Southern
family that is not acquainted (or interested in) matters of wider culture or
debates; for example, climate change. Stifled, unhappy, disenchanted and
adrift, Dellarobia seeks escape from the daily drudgery by seeking out affairs.
She has committed mental adultery—falling of the marriage wagon, if only in
mind, as she puts it—on a few occasions. And now she has taken the inevitable
next step: she has allowed herself to be flattered by the attentions compliments
paid to her by a much younger man, a “telephone man” (whose interest in her
lies strictly south of he border), and is trudging up the mountain to a secret
spot for a secret tryst with the man, knowing fully well that she is risking
everything on an impulse; that the affair would be unlikely to remain a secret
in the small town, and spell the end of her marriage and ruin her reputation.
Is it, then, a stroke of good fortune Dellarobia does not reach her rendezvous?
As she is walking up the mountain path Dellarobia notices that brownish clumps, like
fungus, are hanging from the branches of the fir trees in the forest; the
branches themselves seem alive and writhing. When the path reaches an overlook
and Dellarobia looks across the valley to the mountainside in front of her, the
landscape suddenly intensifies and brightens, as if the forest is “ablaze with
its own internal flames”. The spectacle is strangely moving and fills
Dellarobia with an inner joy. She abandons her plans of meeting the telephone
man and turns back.

What
Dellarobia has mistaken for a forest fire are in fact millions and millions of
Monarch butterflies, of unearthly beauty, with their glowing orange wings, who
have come to rural Tennessee, instead of Mexico, their customary home for the
winter. And the area of the mountain range where the butterflies are clinging
to the trunks and branches of the trees in their millions belongs to the Turnbows.
Dellarobia does not mention what she has seen upon her return, being not sure
what she has seen. She is nevertheless forced to cajole Cub to make a strand
and insist that the family should at least have a look at what is happening in
that part of the wood when Cub informs her that his father was thinking off
logging off all the trees in the wood to a firm in order to pay the debts on
his heavy machinery. Cub is also falling behind the mortgage payment on his
house. That is when the family discovers that millions of butterflies are
roosting in their part of the wood.

The
discovery of the Monarch butterflies unleashes events no one in the Turnbow
family could have imagined. For a start it catapults Dellarobia to a celebrity
status. She is hailed in the local church, enthusiastically proposed by the
credulous Cub and agreed (with different degrees of enthusiasm) by other
parishioners, as a visionary. The sudden appearance of the Monarch butterflies
in Appalachia attracts the usual suspects from different parts of America and
world: the environmentalists, curious tourists,
hippies, media, the scientists (and the Brits). Pressure begins to pile up on Bear Turnbow
when the news leaks that he is planning to sell of the trees for logging which
would mean certain death of the butterflies. The entomologist, the “Monarch
specialist”, who turns up at the Turnbows’ doorstep with his assistants is one
Ovid Byron (who, needless to say, is handsome, sexy, urbane, and, despite being
all of this, is not at all condescending towards the Southern hicks; and on
whom, needless to say, Dellarobia develops a crush the size of Texas). Different
explanations are propagated to explain the sudden appearance of the Monarch
butterflies in Appalachia. Why are they here? The general consensus is that
whatever the reason behind the Monarchs giving up their natural winter habitat
(in Mexico), it is a spectacle of indescribable beauty. Some are inclined to
think that it is an act of god; others see an opportunity to develop the area
as a tourist centre which would also help the ailing economy of the region.
This is the angle exploited by the media who descend on Dellarobia with their
questions and, later, edit her replies to suit their agenda. The scientists beg
to differ. Ovid Byron and his boffins are unable to share the sunny view and
see sinister portents in the arrival of the Monarchs. The Monarchs have flown
into Appalachian woods (and possibly other parts of California), they contend,
because their natural winter habitat, in Mexico, is no longer suitable because
of rising temperatures. The cause? Climate change and deforestation. Far from being
a beautiful act of God the flight behaviour of the monarchs is a harbinger of
things to come. Byron employs Dellarobia in his makeshift lab as an assistant.
The reader traces Dellarobia’s journey towards self-awareness and awareness of
wider ecological issues, and her self-discovery. As the six hundred page novel
comes to an end Dellarobia takes the inevitable step towards actualizing her
potential.

As in Lacuna,
her award winning 2009 novel, Kingsolver combines the quotidian with the wider
issues confronting our planet with an ease that takes your breath away. The
natural phenomena (which provide the ideological theme of the novel) are
blended effortlessly with the experiences of the characters (which provide the
backbone to the story). The plight of the monarchs, which, for reasons entirely
beyond their control, find themselves where they are not supposed to be, is
counterpoised superbly with the predicament of Dellarobia who is not at a place
where she wants to be and, as adrift as the Monarchs, is searching for
moorings. In Flight Behaviour Kingsolver takes on the still amazingly
contentious issue of climate change and global warming (amazing because there
should be no contention about it; the climate is changing and planet is heating
up), and their devastating consequences for our planet. Kingsolver nails her
colours to the mast straightaway. The reader is left in no doubt as to where
her sympathies lie. Kingsolver does not pussyfoot; she is not mealy-mouthed;
the time for subtleties has long since past; as Ovid Byron informs Dellarobia
at one stage, the canary is dead. The message the novel delivers is loud and
clear; and very persuasive. The wider issue of climate change is combined with
the personal story of Dellarobia, which, clichéd and predictable it might be at times, is
equally riveting. The poverty, the difficult life led by people in places like
Feathertown (the setting of the novel), the limited life opportunities available
to them, the patronizing and condescending way in which “the hicks” are often
portrayed and viewed by the cognoscenti—it’s all depicted in a series of
set-pieces, which, while they are a tad overlong at times (such as Dellarobia’s
visit to a “dollarshop” where she is left open-mouthed at the cheap,
second-hand tat on display), manage to be convincing and even funny at times.
Slightly disappointingly, the ending appears a bit rushed. While the reader
does not question the decision Dellarobia takes—indeed the reader may even will
her to take that step—it is not explained how she finally plucks the courage to
escape the life on the farm with a well-meaning, caring but dull and
uninteresting husband.

Flight Behaviour is like a slowburn. The anger and
the frustration of Dellarobia build up gradually, and, when Ovid Byron tells a
vapid television presenter some hometruths about climate change, the reader
fully shares his sense of anger and outrage. This is powerful writing.

One of the many pleasures of reading Flight Behaviour is its sumptuous prose, adorned with caustic
wit and pithy observations. Kingsolver gives the reader an authentic feel of
the regional language without resorting to writing in the dialect (like most of
Faulkner novels, which would have made the experience excruciating for me).

Flight Behaviour seems like a novel written
primarily to disseminate a message of vital importance to our world. The
message comes wrapped in an absorbing story-line which engrosses the reader
slowly but completely.

Monday, 22 September 2014

There is a
growing body of opinion, which is gaining momentum in the right wing press,
that the double Booker Prize winning novelist, Hilary Mantel, has gone bonkers.
There are those who are prepared to concede—never let it be said that the right
wingers cannot be reasonable—that Mantel might still have some links with
reality, but (imagine them nodding their heads sadly) the connection is faulty.
Mental illness can strike anyone, and being a talented artist does not make you
immune from succumbing (it’s a strange word, succumbing; it denotes that it is
somehow the fault of the succumbee that they have succumbed, say, to cancer or
to alcoholism; and only if they had the strength of the character, more will
power, they would have seen the threat off) to mental conditions. Indeed some
might argue that being a genius might even make you vulnerable to losing your
mind. It is always sad when a once talented artist’s once talented mind
disintegrates into lunacy, but these things happen. When the Swiss psychoanalyst
Carl Jung analysed James Joyce’s daughter when she was beginning to lose her
marbles, Jung felt compelled to diagnose schizophrenia in not just her but also
in her father. There was that mathematician—I forget his name; you know whom I
mean; the one on whose life the Oscar winning film Beautiful Mind was
based—who was an absolute genius and also a schizophrenic. Perhaps these things
are related. (I should point out that the reverse is not necessarily true: just
because you are a schizophrenic, you are not a genius.)

Is Hilary
Mantel a genius? I think she is. And I say this not having read either of her
Booker winning novels. A friend of mine told me that Wold Hall, Mantel’s 2009
Booker winner, was one of the worst books she had ever read. (My friend, that
is, not Mantel. I do not know what Mantel thought of her own novel, but I doubt
very much if she thinks it is one of the worst novels she has read, although I
have also read that many authors choose not to read their own novels; so I
don’t know.) She could not go beyond the first ten pages, apparently, my friend.
However, since my friend’s literary appetite is more than adequately assuaged
by the free Waitrose kitchen magazine, I am not sure that her withering verdict
of Wolf
Hall is necessarily a reflection on the quality of Mantel’s novel. Why
do I think Mantel is a genius? I have based my verdict on two (non-Booker
winning) novels of Mantel I have read, both of which, I thought, were superb.

So we agree
that Mantel is a genius. This, we also agree, makes her more vulnerable to
developing a mental illness than Mr. Shabuddhin, who owns a corner-shop round
the corner from my flat. Mr. Shah (as he is known in the area) has not written
any book to the best of my knowledge. He once told me that he had never read a
book in his life, as he could not see the point, and considered the activity to
be a waste of his time which he would rather spend in his shop. (Although I
have not directly asked him, I don’t think Mr. Shah would consider himself a
genius. While there are downsides of not being a genius, if it protects you
from going mad, it has got to be regarded as a plus.)

In addition to Mantel’s (deserving) claim to
being a genius, are there any other vulnerability factors that make Mantel more
prone—than Mr.Shahabuddhin—to succumbing to mental illness? I have heard that
those who go doolally are frequently remembered by their friends as always
being a bit weird. Is Mantel weird? She might be. I have read a non-fiction
book of Mantel entitled Giving Up the Ghost , which I thought
was very readable; but I also remember thinking, when I finished it, that, no
offence, but the woman was a bit weird. (Mantel describes in the book a
childhood experience—which has stayed with her all her life—when she
encountered evil in the back-garden of her house; and she is not talking
metaphorically).

Who has
diagnosed mental illness in Hilary Mantel? A chap called Timothy Bell—who is a
Lord—is convinced that Mantel is a dangerous lunatic. Lord Bell—a friend and a
former PR advisor to Margaret Thatcher, according to Independent (and to a number
of disgraced celebrities, dodgy companies and third world dictators, according
to another article in the Guardian) thinks
that Mantel should (a) be investigated by the police and (b) see a therapist.
Why is Lord Bell moved to suggest such drastic measures? Lord Bell’s
(unsolicited) advice to the police (that they should investigate Mantel) and to
Mantel (that she should see a therapist) is in response to a short story Mantel
published on line in the Guardian this
month, entitled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which is one of the
short-stories which will be published in a compilation at the end of the month
(also titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher). The short story
depicts a scene in which a Scouser (a bit of a regional stereotype here; why
couldn’t the would-be assassin be from Berkshire?) enters the house of an
ordinary woman whose kitchen window looks on to the back-garden of the hospital
where Thatcher has come for a minor procedure on her eye. In an interview given
to the Guardian Mantel admitted that
she had a “boiling distaste” for Thatcher. The kernel of the story, she also
revealed, occurred to her more than thirty years ago when she spotted an
unguarded Margaret Thatcher from a window in Windsor and apparently thought
that if she (Mantel) were someone else she (Thatcher) would be dead. (In other
words Mantel lacked the guts to kill Thatcher or, like Gandhi, decided that
violence does not solve anything.) So Thatcher survived (only to succumb to
Alzheimer’s decades later, but not before she had brought ruination on working
class communities); but it did not stop Mantel from fantasizing about murdering
Thatcher, and she decided to sublimate her murderous instinct through the
creative avenue open to her. She wrote a story. Mantel said that it took her
more than thirty years to complete the story, a case of a very long writer’s
block, although we can’t really say that, seeing as the woman published several
novels (two of which went on to win the Booker) and non-fiction work in the
intervening decades while she was wrestling with the technicalities of the story.

The right
wing, Tory-loving, press has gone nuts after the Guardian published the story. Lord Bell felt—and he should
know—that the story was “unquestionably in bad taste”. Another Tory MP, Nadine Doris—who I believe
has written a novel which she is flogging for 77 p or some such price on Amazon
Kindle—is “gutted” and “shocked”. Why?
Because the publication of Mantel’s short story is so close to Thatcher’s
death. Thatcher, Doris reminds Mantel, still has a living family. Doris
concludes—to make this issue absolutely clear—that Mantel’s story has a
character, Thatcher, whose demise is so recent.
(Would Doris have minded had Mantel waited for ten more years to publish
this story? She had waited for thirty years already; would ten more years have
been such a disaster?) Another Tory MP, someone called Stewart Jackson, is
convinced that Mantel is a weirdo and her “death story” is “sick and deranged”.
A Conservative activist called Tim Montgomery is disappointed that the Guardian chose to promote Mantel’s
story full of hateful words about Mrs. Thatcher, his hero.

Is writing
a short story about a recently diseased former prime minister of the country
who—shall we say?—a divisive figure in the history of twentieth century British
politics, in which the author depicts a scenario of the impending assassination
of the said prime-minister suggestive of a mental illness in the author? Is it
a criminal act? That depends, one would assume, on what is written. I read the
short-story on line. Now I am no psychiatrist; neither am I columnist in a
right wing, Labour-bashing broadsheet; nor a champagne swigging,
minority-hating, homophobic Tory supporter; but Mantel’s short story struck me
as a very well written piece with glimpses of Mantel’s trade-mark dark humour.
You might accuse Mantel of bad taste or of sick mind but not of a criminal act
that would have police arrive at your doorsteps with a search warrant for your
mind, or social workers and psychiatrists wanting to put you on a community
order unless you accepted antipsychotics. Mantel may be ideologically diseased
and suffering from incurable hatred of Maggie Thatcher on the dubious grounds
that Thatcher was a disaster for the country, but mad and a criminal?

Everybody
has a good and bad side. However, when one is judging a dead person, I see no
good reason why only the best self-manifestations of the diseased should be the
basis of the final judgement.

I am
currently in the midst of writing a couple of short stories. The premise of the
first one is as follows: David Cameron gets kidnapped by an army of cockroaches
which tickles his privates with their hairy legs and giant antennae until he
either agrees to recommend the cockroach-chief as the next leader of the Tory
party, or dies of laughter-induced exhaustion. The second one, which is still in the conception
phase, is an erotic fantasy revolving around the love affair between Teresa May
and a giant cucumber.However, I am
worried now. I should perhaps wait until Cameron and May are six feet under for twenty years before I attempt to publish it.

Sunday, 7 September 2014

In 1952, an ageing and paranoid Joseph Stalin decided that it was time to put the doctors in
Soviet Union to the sword. The deaths of high-positioned Soviet apparatchiks
convinced Stalin that doctors were agents of the Western powers, out to
assassinate Soviet leadership by poisoning it. (The truth, of course, was more
prosaic. The men died from natural—and in some cases self-inflicted—reasons
such as advanced alcoholism and heart failure; and nothing that the doctors
could have done would have saved them.) The last grisly and gruesome episode of
Stalin’s “terror” was unleashed, which ended, mercifully, after only a few
months with his death. Innocent
doctors—several of them Jewish (Stalin was not anti-Semitic for religious
reasons, but he considered Jews to be potential Fifth Elements), were arrested,
and confessions were obtained from them by Stalin’s usual tactics (beat, beat,
and beat some more). The numbers, initially small, quickly swelled up to
hundreds. Public opinion against the
arrested doctors was mobilised; preposterous articles were published in Pravda about the “doctors’ plot”—uncovered
by the vigilance of the loyal party members—designed to kill top Soviet
leadership including Stalin himself. (The headline of the article, which set
the tone of the article, was: “Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of
Academic Physicians”). The idea was to build up public fervour, leading to show
trials. The arrested doctors were lucky in comparison with the millions who
perished in Stalin’s ‘terror’ of the 1930s (which probably inspired Mao Tse
Tung’s “Cultural Revolution” in the
1960s) because the dictator died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in March 1953.
(According to Simon Sebag Montefiero’s excellent Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,
Stalin was alone in his study at night when he suffered a “cerebrovascular
accident”, and his death was perhaps hastened because no medical help was
immediately available.) The new Soviet
leadership quickly distanced itself from Stalin’s last, mostly pointless, act
of vengeance. The trials—set to start in March 1953—were cancelled, and the
doctors released.

The
short-lasting episode against the Soviet doctors, in the last days of Stalin’s
dictatorship, is the inspiration behind the Orange Prize winner Helen Dunmore’s
2010 novel The Betrayal.

Dunmore,
who won the inaugural (1996) Orange Prize for A Spell of Winter,
enjoyed success of another sort with her 2001 novel The Siege which was
commercial success. The Siege tells the story of the first (and the harshest)
winter during the three-year siege of Leningrad by the Germans during the
Second World War.

In The
Betrayal we meet some of the characters in The Siege. It is almost
ten years since the siege of Leningrad. Stalin, apparently immortal, is still
ruling the Soviet Union. Andrei is a young paediatrician (with special interest
in arthritic conditions) working in Leningrad’s hospital. His wife, Anna, works
in a children’s nursery. Andrei and Anna live together with Anna’s younger
brother, Kolya. We learn that Anna’s mother (also a physician) died in childbirth
while her father, a writer and poet who fell out of favour in the 1930s and was
ostracized (but was lucky enough not to have been sent to Siberia), died,
together with Marina—a woman who probably became his partner after his wife’s
death—, during the siege of Leningrad. Andrei and Anna are slowly building
their lives from the wreckage of the Second World War, in Stalin’s Russia,
taking care—as most under Soviet dictatorship did—not to do anything that would
make them conspicuous. Then one day Andrei is approached by Russov, a highly
positioned doctor in Andrei’s hospital, for a second opinion on a ten year old
child who has been admitted with a swelling under his knee. The child is the
son of a high ranking KGB officer named Volkov. Andrei senses a trap. Years of
living under Stalin have taught Andrei that he should do his utmost to steer
clear of anything that has to do with the party officials. He suspects that the
child’s condition is potentially serious and Russov is trying to pass on the
buck. Anna advises Andrei to call in off sick on the day he is supposed to see
the boy. Andrei declines (did I forget to tell you that he is a conscientious
doctor?) and examines the boy. His suspicions are confirmed. The child, he
reckons, has a tumour growing on his bone. This is not his area of expertise at
all and he decides to tell Russov who—Andrei knows—must have known this even
before he asked Andrei for an opinion.
What the boy needs, Andrei thinks, is a good surgeon. However, any hopes
Andrei might have had of wriggling out of the case are dashed when he is
summoned to meet Volkov, the boy’s father. Volkov informs Andrei that his son
has taken a liking for Andrei and he, Volkov, wants Andrei to be the doctor
overall in charge of the case, never mind that he is not an expert in the
field. Andrei recommends a biopsy of the swelling, which, he tells Volkov, is
most probably a tumour. The biopsy is performed by a Jewish female surgeon
called Brodskaya. The biopsy shows that the tumour is of a particularly malignant
variety (called osteosarcoma) with poor prognosis. The only option which has a
chance of saving the boy’s life is amputation of leg. Which is what
Brodskaya—another conscientious, hard-working doctor—recommends. Andrei conveys
the “expert opinion” to Volkov and suggests that in Leningrad Brodskaya is the
best surgeon to carry out the operation (thus unwittingly doing to Brodskya
what Russov did to him). Volkov is not happy. He is not happy that his son is
going to lose his leg; and he is not happy that the surgeon who will carry out
the operation is Jewish. In the end he agrees, threatening vaguely that there
would be hell to pay if anything goes wrong. The operation is carried out; the
boy is discharged; and Andrei thinks his ordeal is over. But it is not (we are
only half-way through the novel). Within months the boy is back with symptoms
that strongly suggest that the tumour, despite Brodskaya’s extensive surgery,
has spread to lungs. The boy is going to die. Volkov is incandescent with rage.
It is doctors’ fault; indeed it is more than just incompetence; it is a
conspiracy, and the Jews are involved. His son is dying and the doctors will
have to pay. Thus begins the nightmare for Andrei and Anna. I shall not reveal how the plot develops for
not wanting to give away too much, but anyone familiar with the “doctors’ plot”
will have an idea the direction the novel is going to take.

The Betrayal is not an excessively complicated
novel. Dunmore leaves the readers in no doubt as to which side she wants them
to be on. It is a novel in which the characters are either black or they are
white; there are no shades of grey. It is a battle between those who are beyond
reproach and those who are ignorant, paranoid and vengeful. (Vulkov does show
some promise at being more than just a two-dimensional, stereotypical KGB
monster, but only fleetingly). Andrei and Anna are so perfect—hard-working,
idealistic, conscientious, so very understanding of each other (Anna “understands”
why Andrei would want to get involved with the Vulkov case even if that means
trouble), and so much in love with each other—that you wish at times for them
to have at least one good fight, or, failing that, unsatisfactory sex life; but
no!, these two enjoy brilliant sex-life. The supporting cast of characters,
like the protagonists of the novel, are neatly divided into good (Andrei and
Anna’s friends) and weaselly (Russov who lands Andrei in trouble, and Maslov,
the professor who refuses to stand by his protégée after Andrei’s fall from
grace). As you read the novel, you do feel sorry for the plight of Andrei and
Anna, but not excessively—and you feel guilty about it—because you find—there
is no kinder way of saying this— them a bit dull.

The Betrayal is a novel of two halves. The first
half of the novel is brilliantly paced. There is a sense of urgency and
foreboding right from its first sentence (“It’s a fresh June morning without a
trace of humidity, but Russov is sweating”) and the tension builds up from
there on. Dunmore has done her research thoroughly (there is a page-long
bibliography at the end of the novel and the reader is urged, in case he wants
to know what other books Dunmore researched, to read the bibliography of The
Siege) and she conveys superbly the atmosphere of oppression,
suspicion, mistrust, and antagonism that many characters in the novel find
themselves in the midst of, and which no doubt engulfed the Soviet society
during Stalin’s dictatorship. The mindless drudgery, petty bureaucracy, and
obsession of small-minded officials with numbers and statistics (which, they
hope, will further their careers) that seem to have been endemic to many a
Communist dictatorship, are described very drolly. The exhortations of Anna’s
boss (at the children’s nursery) to collect more pointless data and deluge the
mothers—tired by the daily grind of hard-work—with simplistic advice and
information provide the only light relief in a novel which is grim almost till
the end.

By
comparison, the second half of the novel drags a bit. As Dunmore describes,
with obvious relish, Andrei’s ordeal in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow (where he
is transferred), when he is interrogated, the reader can be excused for feeling
a tad impatient, wanting to know how it all ends for him. While there is no
doubt that the descriptions of Andrei’s torture in Lubyanka are authentic, they
do tend to slow down what until then is an exquisitely paced novel. The end,
when it comes, is a bit anti-climactic, but is probably in keeping with the
resolution of the historical doctors’ plot. The ending also suggests that the
reader shouldn’t at all be surprised if in due course a third novel featuring
Andrei and Anna and their child(ren)—Anna gives birth to a daughter when Andrei
is in prison— appears.

Thursday, 14 August 2014

The
protagonist of Tracy Chivalier’s 2012 novel, The Last Runaway, is a
twenty year old Quaker woman named Honor Bright.

The name of
the protagonist and her Quaker background are clues as to the course of the
heroine’s life in the novel. Whether Honor Bright is bright can be a matter of
opinion; what cannot be doubted are her honourable intentions. The woman is more upright than Gandhi and more honourable Mother Teresa.

Jilted by
her Quaker fiancé in England who decides to abandon not just Honor but his
faith in order to marry a non-Quaker woman he has fallen in love with, Honor
decides to leave the bad memories and the Quaker community of Bridport, Dorest behind,
and travels with her more enterprising sister, Grace, who is set to go to Ohio,
America to join her Quaker betrothed, an ex-neighbour of the Bright family.
Upon reaching America Grace swiftly (and conveniently) pops her clogs and Adam
Cox, the man who is set to marry Grace (and does not know of Grace’s
death) ,is faced with Grace’s younger sister, who, he doesn’t know, has
travelled with Grace to America. After spending a few awkward weeks in the Cox household—Abigail, Grace’s would be sister-in-law, recently widowed herself,
and, as subsequent developments show, having marked Adam as a possible replacement
for his dead brother, does not take kindly to the uninvited guest, possibly
marking her as a rival—Honor, not keen at all on returning to England, although
in her letters to her friend back in Bridport she moans endlessly about the
brash Americans who lack subtlety, because of her horror of sea-sickness (!),
marries into another Quaker family in the community, after making love with her
would be husband, Jack Haymaker, in a cornfield (a very un-Quakerish behaviour,
if you ask me, although I am no expert on the mores of the nineteenth century
Quakers). Honor starts her new life with the Haymakers, with her husband, Jack; mother-in-law, Judith; and Jack's unmarried sister, Dorcas. At this stage Honor
is faced with a moral dilemma that threatens to break her marriage (and which
gives the novel its title). Soon after she reaches Ohio Honor becomes aware of
the so called Underground Railroad, a network of liberal minded Americans who
provide shelter and food to slaves who are escaping from South, towards freedom in
Canada. Indeed soon after her arrival in America, while awaiting Adam Cox to fetch her, Honor spends a few days with a feisty alcoholic (no cause and effect relationship, here) named Belle Mills,
who is heavily involved in the Underground Railroad. Her half-brother, Donavon,
on the other hand, is an egg that is bad (and not even trying to be good). Donovan is a
slave-catcher, and has the law on his side. Herein lies Honor’s
moral dilemma. As a Quaker she is vehemently against slavery and wants to
do what she can to help the escaping slaves who are passing through Ohio; at
the same time, as a Quaker, she is also expected to obey the law. Her in-laws are
in no doubt as to what course of action the family should follow: obey the law
and steer clear of the runaway slaves. The slaves have obviously enough wits about
them that brought them all the way from the South to Ohio; and the same wits
would see them make their way to freedom in Canada. And if they get caught,
well, it’s too bad, but what can anyone do about it? Honor Bright begs to differ. She wants to hide the slaves
from Donavon, and give them water and such comestible as can be gathered. (Donavon
seems to be the only slave-catcher in the area who, for reasons best known to him, has taken into his head that stalking the Quaker community, in particular the Haymakers, would greatly enhance his chances of catching slaves.) The
situation in the Haymaker family is fast reaching what the hostage negotiators
describe as impasse. Honor Bright refuses to back down, and, even though Jack has
managed to put her bun in the oven, decides to leave the marital home to stay with
Belle Mills. Belle is not best pleased with this development, not because she does not wish to share her alcoholic beverage (although that could be a reason; the recidivist alcoholics have been known to be notoriously selfish in these matters), but because she is worried that Honor's presence in her house might put her secret activities linked to Underground Railroad in jeopardy. And she is right. Donovan the rapscallion begins visiting his half-sister's house with worrying
frequency, giving signals that are hard to miss (and ignore) that while he suspects
Honor of harbouring sympathy for the runaway slaves he also finds the pregnant
Quaker woman a trouser-stirrer. The end, when it finally comes, is as
predictable as it is formulaic. It all ends well for Honor, you will be pleased to know. Donovan meets his comeuppance; and the person who sends him packing to his meeting with his Maker is Belle, who can't be prosecuted for murder as she herself is dying having drunk her way to liver cirrhosis.

Tracy
Chivalier, an American novelist who lives in England (and probably has a Quaker
background), has built for herself a formidable reputation as a novelist of
historical fiction. In The Last Runaway she attempts to combine historical
narrative with romance. The result is a strangely unconvincing and anaemic novel.
Chivalier, as the afterwards of the novel informs, has undertaken a lot of
historical research for this novel. (The Underground Railroad system, for
example, was an actual system run by the whites that helped slaves on the run
from their masters.) To Chivalier’s credit, for the most part, she does not
allow the painstaking research to sit heavily on the novel, and avoids the
temptation of showing off. The first half of the novel is full of what can be
described period details aimed at conveying the minutiae of the daily life of the nineteenth
century Quakers. The readers can be excused for feeling a tad weary after being
subjected to a detailed account, that runs into pages, of how quilts are sown, accompanied by a scholarly discourse on the relative merits of the American and English
styles (the English type is more intricate and requires more skills, in case you
want to know).

The problem
with the novel is that the plot does not really go anywhere. There is no drama.
It is almost as if Chivalier is too much in awe of the central character. Honor
Bright has the conviction of her beliefs that one can expect in the self-righteous.
The moral uppitines, combined with the fact that Honor, in reality, is doing
not a great deal to ease the afflictions of the runaway slaves (leaving water
and dried meat outside of the house must have been of help, but it would
stretch the limits of credulity to think that the slaves, who have managed to
travel several hundred kilometres, would have been unable to survive without the
meagre food rations; and did they really need the Haymakers when the there
seems to be only a solitary slave-catcher in the region, Donavon, whose
attentions and energies are divided between getting drunk and casting lustful
glances at Honor’s loins?) makes Honor Bright, for the most part, more irritating than a kidney stone. The latent sexual attraction between Honor and
Donavon remains just that; this strand of the novel remains frustratingly underdeveloped. The main the characters are either two-dimensional or cartoonishly implausible or both.

The
strength of the novel is its prose. There is a soothing quality and an understated elegance to Chivalier’s prose that makes The Last
Runaway an easy enough read despite its rather lame story that is neither a
romance nor serious historical fiction. Not one of Chivalier’s best, I am
afraid.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.